shortwave radios would enable you to still get news of major events - not 2 way though
Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
201–210 of 775 posts
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#202Your first option until you get settled is to use an SSH reverse proxy: ssh -D 9999 user@my.server Then configure your browser to use local port 9999 for your SOCKS5 proxy. This gets you a temporarily usable system and if you can tunnel this way successfully installing some WireGuard or OpenVPN stuff will likely work. EDIT: Thanks it's -D not -R
It’s -D, -R is for forwarding specific ports.
Thanks I have updated my comment as well.
Sorry for the brain rot!
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#203I live in Pakistan and two years back we had this exact same problem, (election interference) and frankly, you just try to scrape through solutions, but without an answerable government, there is little you can do.
We tried things like Proton VPN and Windscribe VPN, as well as enabling MT proxy on Telegram, but soon govts find it easier to just mass ban internet access.
Use Netblocks.org to analyse the level of internet blockage and try to react accordingly.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#204You've come to a wrong place to ask. Most people here (judging by recommendations of own VPN instances, Tor, Tailscale/other Wireguard-based VPNs, and Mullvad) don't have any experience with censorship circumvention. Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. These are the cutting edge tech, they may not be so privacy-friendly as Mullvad, but they will certainly work.
Hmm. People who recommend widely used approaches, and well-known, well-established providers, "don't have any experience with cenorship circumvention". So the solution is no-name providers using random ad-hoc hackery, chosen according to a criterion more or less custom designed to lead you into watering hole attacks. Right.
None of the things I listed are "widely used approaches, and well-known, well-established providers" in the parts of the world where it does matter.
Yeah, maybe V* and derivatives are random ad-hoc hackery, but they also are the well-known standard now.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#205- Tor. Pros: Reasonably user friendly and easy to get online, strong anonymity, free. Cons: a common target for censorship, not very fast, exit nodes are basically universally distrusted by websites. - Tailscale with Mullvad exit nodes. Pros: little setup but not more than installing and configuring a program, faster than Got, very versatile. Cons: deep packet inspection can probably identify your traffic is using Mu…
Wireguard is not censorship-resistant, and most VPN-averse countries block cross-border Wireguard. Why reply a practical question in an area in which you have no experience?
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#206Hello! I've got experience working on censorship circumvention for a major VPN provider (in the early 2020s). - First things first, you have to get your hands on actual VPN software and configs. Many providers who are aware of VPN censorship and cater to these locales distribute their VPNs through hard-to-block channels and in obfuscated packages. S3 is a popular option but by no means the only one, and some VPN prov…
I wonder if it can be embedded in a video stream, like a video of a lava lamp that you always have open, but the lsb of ever byte is meaningful.
That's an interesting idea, and probably something you might be able to achieve with a tool like h26forge.
It's also probably more useful to just have a connection be fully dedicated to a VPN, and have the traffic volume over time mimic what you'd see in a video, rather than embedding it in a video -- thanks to letsencrypt, much of the web's served over TLS these days (asterisks for countries like KZ and TM which force the use of a state-sponsored CA), so going to great lengths to embed your VPN in a video isn't really practical.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#207- Tor. Pros: Reasonably user friendly and easy to get online, strong anonymity, free. Cons: a common target for censorship, not very fast, exit nodes are basically universally distrusted by websites. - Tailscale with Mullvad exit nodes. Pros: little setup but not more than installing and configuring a program, faster than Got, very versatile. Cons: deep packet inspection can probably identify your traffic is using Mu…
> - Tailscale with Mullvad exit nodes Tailscale is completely unnecessary here, unless OP can't connect to Mullvad.net in the first place to sign up. But if the Indonesian government blocks Mullvad nodes, they'll be out of luck either way. > - Your own VPSs with Wireguard/Tailscale Keep in mind that from the POV of any websites you visit, you will be easily identifiable due to your static IP. My suggestion would be t…
Tailscale + Mullvad does have a privacy advantage over either one by itself: the party that could potentially spy on the VPN traffic (Mullvad) doesn’t know whose traffic it is beyond that it’s a Tailscale customer. Any government who wanted to trace specific traffic back to OP would need to get the cooperation of both Mullvad and Tailscale, which is a lot less likely than even the quite unlikely event of getting Mullvad to cooperate.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#208[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't worry, you shouldn't underestimate the capability of society. You should be worried. Don't underestimate the capabilities of the government bureaucrats. That "guys down the pub" will quickly disappear once they start getting jail time for their activities.
Yes, it's also dystopian to pin one's future on such hopes. People need to stick it to the government and demand their freedoms. Far too many things are being forced on us in the West that go against fundamental values that have been established for centuries. Somehow, things that could be unifying protests where the working class of every political stripe are able to overlook their differences and push back against…
Reflex. People's opinion on a subject changes if you tell them which political group supports it, sometimes even if they get asked twice in a row. Tribal identity determines ideology more than the other way around for a lot of people.
So as soon as Labour comes out for something, Cons are inclined to be against it and so on. The only way to have neutral protests is if no one visibly backs them and they don't become associated with a side, but then how do they get support and organization?
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#210Hello! I've got experience working on censorship circumvention for a major VPN provider (in the early 2020s). - First things first, you have to get your hands on actual VPN software and configs. Many providers who are aware of VPN censorship and cater to these locales distribute their VPNs through hard-to-block channels and in obfuscated packages. S3 is a popular option but by no means the only one, and some VPN prov…
This makes me wonder: are there "cloud drive virtual sneakernet" systems that will communicate e.g. by a client uploading URL request(s) as documents via OneDrive/SharePoint/Google Drive/Baidu etc., a server reacting to this via webhook and uploading (say) a PDF version of the rendered site, then allowing the client to download that PDF? You effectively use the CDN of that service as a (very slow) proxy. Of course, h…
It doesn't apply imo as OP is probably not a high value target of the govt, he just wants to bypass his govt restrictions and I doubt the situation is so bad that the govt will send people physically to deal with people circumventing the block.
Your solution could technically work over any kind of open connection / data transfer protocol that isn't blocked by the provider but it would be an absolute pain to browse the web that way and there are probably better solutions out there.